I'm sure I'm not the only one who's been annoyed at software that works fine under XP, but won't run under Vista...

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Is this any different than running Virtual PC?

If you don't have a valid XP license, I guess.

Yeah, that's a good point. I'm just trying to figure out if it's a full virtualization, or if its just some kind of hypervisor that sits between the app and the OS. I didn't dig too far into the details but it didn't have a lot of details readily available.

I perused through the datasheets. Apparently, VirtualPC2007 SP1 is installed within the desktop OS. A client Microsoft OS is running within VirtualPC 2007 in such a manner that the applications installed on the virtual machine image are made available from the start menu of the host desktop machine.

The datasheets also state that MED-V v1 can only run on managed desktops and requires both Active Directory and separate management servers, so I suspect that the initial release will probably be of interest to only large or enterprise level customers.

I could see the federal agency where I work going with this if for no other reason than security. It has an installation option which allows reversion of the virtualized image to a clean one at the end of the day, eliminating any changes to the virtualized OS or its installed applications. I can just see our security Nazis drooling (virtually speaking ) over this.

It doesn't say whether the virtual OS within the image requires a separate license. However, we are talking about Micro$oft here -- of course it will require a second license! Who are we kidding???

Well, there you have have it; not many folks running AD servers at home these days. It feels like a migration tool for businesses that will have to upgrade to Win7 as their support runs out for (read: Microsoft finally stops supporting) XP.

My federal agency still has 70,000+ workstations running XP Pro at this time. They have been planning on an upgrade to Vista for 2+ years now, and are still creating and testing workstation images. Mainly, I suspect, because a lot of the software we depend on is home-grown, one of a kind stuff you can't get anywhere else and will not run properly in Vista without some major re-tooling.

Besides the security aspects, I could see them using something like this to do a temporary upgrade to Vista while waiting on Win7 to stabilize. From everything I have read, Win7 seems like it will be the real deal -- what Vista should have been. Of course, it also just may be MS's pre-release publicity fanboys running wild. We'll see....

I suspect that customers like my employer are precisely why Microsoft are pushing this technology -- they can take away some of the downside to of upgrading OSes while at the same time making money off of older OSes being run under virtual machines. It ain't called Micro"$"oft for nothing!

VMware already has this capability under VMware Workstation 6.5. It's called "Unity" mode. There are limitations to this though. The apps that get launched in Unity Mode see the disk drives of their corresponding VM, not the outter OS. (You can MAP the physical/outter machine's drives to the VM though so that the real machine's drives can be viewed from within the VM apps).

VMware doesn't require this.

VMware has, for many years now, supported "non-persistent" virtual hard drives. When a VMware HD is set to "non-persistent," as soon as you power off the VM, any changes made during the previously powered on session are gone.

Agreed, but running XP inside of a VMware virtual machine also requires a separate license.

I picked up a copy of VMWare Workstation a few weeks ago during their 50% off holiday promotion. I'm hoping to make good use of it when I eventually get around to building my new quad core machine in the next month or two (I really need to get off my duff and pick a case and motherboard - at the rate I'm going, that Q9550 is going to be obsolete before I get it built ).

Though VMWare does obviously have better tech, it remains to be seen if Microsoft will abuse its monopoly power (as it has many times in the past) to damage VMWare's business model.

Plus, it is an unfortunate fact that a lot of large businesses and government agencies (like my employer) will go for the Microsoft offering not because it is the best but rather because they run a full MS software stack and "Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft".